The first 4 weeks of buddhify 2 – a review

02.03.2014

With the launch of buddhify 2 four weeks old today, here is a quick summary of what has happened over that short time.

Media coverage

The Jan 6 launch was thematically an ideal time to launch – for many people it was their first day back at work and with many fresh new year’s resolutions around mindfulness already needing support, buddhify 2 was an ideal fit. There were however two big issues with this launch date – firstly the mountainous inboxes that most people have at the start of the year and secondly the fact that the Consumer Electronics Show was happening in Las Vegas – so all that meant was that it was really hard to get any decent tech journalist attention. But we did get some, and what we have received has been excellent, most notably the pieces on Lifehacker and The Daily Beast. Meditation, mindfulness and technology isn’t something that is going away any time soon so we expect to pick up more coverage over the rest of the year, especially since buddhify 2 is quite a compelling and different story. It’s also a shame that unlike games, there aren’t specific sites which review meditation apps… maybe one day…

Sales breakdown

While the coverage has been good, the actual sales have been excellent to date. In our first four weeks we’ve had 20,193 downloads. This is a big number for us given that the original buddhify app was itself a modest cult success and sold 30,000 in eighteen months.

For those of you more familiar with the likes of Angry Birds and the enormous figures those kind of apps get, it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of apps effectively get zero downloads so 20k paid app customers in 4 weeks is a massive result for a team the size of ours. And if you still think 20k is not a lot of users then as my friend and mentor Paul Bennun says ‘it’s a hell of a lot of people if they are all standing outside your house’

As well as it being incredibly encouraging that so many people decided to invest in buddhify 2, it also practically means that we have a decent amount of revenue to invest in growing the user-base and improving the product (more on that below).

Country breakdown

It’s really interesting to look at where all those 20,000 people are.

These results are actually quite surprising. While US, UK, Canada & Australia dominate the stats which is to be expected based on the type of product and the language it’s in, they make up only 80% of sales – whereas in the original buddhify they were effectively 100%. This indicates that while UK & North America are still the primary targets for buddhify 2, there is an increasingly international audience for this kind of product – with European countries like the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France & Denmark all showing significant user numbers.

iTunes ratings

So far we’ve received 99 reviews through iTunes. The breakdown is:

5 star reviews, 72,

4 star reviews, 13

3 star reviews, 3

2 star reviews, 9

1 star reviews, 2

Which all in all gives an average star review of 4.5 out of 5. Which is pretty good.

This is the most important stuff. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of reviews, tweets, emails and other messages from users of the app telling us how it has helped them. Just one email we received from a lawyer in New York talking about how it had touched their life made all the effort worthwhile and it really is remarkable to contemplate the difference our offering is making and can make. It is moving and energising at the same time so thank you.

Content requests

buddhify 2 has a simple messaging system in the app where people can suggest areas for new content which they’d like to see us add to the app. We deliberately launched the app with only half the content spaces filled so that over the rest of the year we can add dozens of new meditations based on what people want, so that by the end of the year buddhify 2 will have a whacking 96 meditations on it.

Alongside the most popular existing content such as the online meditations, those for walking, sleep and stress the top five other most popular requests so far are:

For anxiety & difficult emotion

For parenting

For managing pain & illness

Housework &

Motivation

So what we’re going to do is assess all the suggestions and create content accordingly…you should see the first set of new tracks arrive magically in the app later this Spring.

Feature requests

Alongside the minor bug fixes (we’ve already pushed one update a couple of weeks back) as you’d expect, alongside the content requests we’ve also had a whack load of feature requests which we will also assess in the next few weeks. Our fundamental wish is to keep the app as simple and intuitive as possible and it can be tempting to add this and add that but that isn’t always the best thing to do. The current feature set is based on our initial and detailed user research and so if we add something (or indeed take something away) it will be because it’s the right thing to do.

We’ve also of course received hundreds of emails about having the app on Android and we’ll be assessing this too.

So all in all, it’s been quite a first few weeks and we look forward to developing the app and indeed this whole area of mind-positive technology through the wider work of our parent company 21awake.

And finally, if you are one of our first 20,000 users then thank you. You are in the special club of buddhify 2 early adopters and your help – direct and indirect – is so greatly appreciated.

Comments 3

Rohan, this is a great app. I had the original buddhify and really enjoyed it, so updating was a no-brainer. I love the new meditations you’ve put in this version. One thought-since you have a history in here already, maybe integrate with Lift to automatically update a Lift meditation plan after using buddhify?
Thanks-keep up the great work!
Rob

Hello!
I know you mentioned many requests for Android…I know it costs money and isn’t easy. Why not crowdfund for it? Those who have sent e-mail requests can put their money where their emails are…and if enough people sign up, then you create it!
Cheers!